<\/p>\n
Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong>\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0<\/em>the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here<\/em>\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday.<\/em><\/p>\n When the\u00a0Long Museum<\/strong>, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors\u00a0Liu Yiqian<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Wang Wei<\/strong>, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being less active in terms of buying. They were actively selling, too.<\/p>\n Previously, the paintings being sold by collectors like Liu and Wang\u2014a $34.9 million\u00a0Modigliani<\/strong>\u00a0that appeared at\u00a0Sotheby\u2019s<\/strong>\u00a0last year, for example\u2014came from the West and made their way to China via flashy purchases. Today, it is the opposite: these very same paintings are being sent back to the West, where they will likely find new buyers.<\/p>\n Now, there is news of at least two major paintings on the market that appear to come from China: a\u00a0Warhol<\/strong>\u00a0that, according to a source close to the gallery, is priced in excess of $100 million and a\u00a0Basquiat<\/strong>\u00a0that sold in 2013 for $29 million.<\/p>\n In mid-May\u2014not coincidentally, during the major auctions in New York\u2014Gagosian<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0opened \u201cIcons From a Half Century of Art,\u201d an exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Basquiat,\u00a0David Hockney<\/strong>,\u00a0Jasper Johns<\/strong>,\u00a0Donald Judd<\/strong>,\u00a0Gerhard Richter<\/strong>,\u00a0Mark Rothko<\/strong>,\u00a0Richard Serra<\/strong>,\u00a0Frank Stella<\/strong>,\u00a0Cy Twombly<\/strong>, and Warhol. It is open only to collectors, and can only be seen by appointment at Gagosian\u2019s 24th Street gallery in New York. The image the gallery used to promote the exhibition on its website is of a Warhol \u201cMao.\u201d Warhol famously created no fewer than 199 images of \u201cMao,\u201d but this isn\u2019t just any \u201cMao.\u201d It is the only one of the four so-called \u201cgiant Maos\u201d\u2014they stand a full 15 feet high\u2014that is not in a museum.<\/p>\n The last time the Gagosian \u201cMao\u201d was publicly on the market was in 2008, when Christie\u2019s, in collaboration with London dealer\u00a0James Mayor<\/strong>, sent the painting to Hong Kong with a price tag of $120 million. As described in\u00a0write-up<\/a>\u00a0at the time in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>, that price would have set a record for the artist: the auction record for a Warhol then was the $71.7 million\u00a0Christie\u2019s<\/strong>\u00a0got in May 2007 for the 1963 silkscreen\u00a0Green Car Crash<\/em>. (The record today is the $195 million that\u00a0Larry Gagosian<\/strong>\u00a0paid for a\u00a0painting of Marilyn Monroe<\/a>\u00a0at Christie\u2019s in 2022.) But the \u201cMao\u201d didn\u2019t sell in 2008 in Hong Kong, and then came the recession. According to a source with close knowledge of the painting, it did, however, sell around 2013 for a price within the range of $120 million.<\/p>\n The person involved in that transaction, dealers say, was\u00a0Rosaline Wong<\/strong>, who has in the past reportedly worked on behalf of\u00a0Henry Cheng<\/strong>, chairman of Hong Kong\u2013based\u00a0New World Development<\/strong>. According to\u00a0Forbes<\/em>, Cheng, who succeeded his own father at New World, is China\u2019s third-richest person. New World\u2019s shares dropped 60 percent between January 2023 and January 2024, and the Cheng family\u2019s net worth dropped by nearly a fourth, to $22.1 billion.<\/p>\n Wong is a former Hong Kong barrister that\u00a0Artnet News<\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0South China Morning Post<\/em>\u00a0previously linked to the purchase of a $150 million\u00a0Gustav Klimt<\/strong>\u00a0painting. The painting was previously owned by\u00a0Oprah Winfrey<\/strong>, and the transaction was brokered by Gagosian, according to Bloomberg. More recently,\u00a0Artnet News<\/em>\u00a0linked Wong with a Klimt that\u00a0sold at Sotheby\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0last year for $108.4 million. Dealers who worked with Wong between 2013 and 2015 say she appeared to be buying on behalf of a foundation that was in formation.<\/p>\n According to\u00a0South China Morning Post<\/em>, around 2015, Wong founded an investment advisory company,\u00a0HomeArt<\/strong>, which matches individuals and companies with art for sale. The\u00a0SCMP<\/em>\u00a0reported in 2022 that at that time Wong was \u201cin the middle of setting up a US$1 billion \u2018museum-grade\u2019 art investment fund with Hong Kong- and Singapore-based asset management firm Zheng He Capital, which counts among its heavyweight advisers Gagosian and Wong\u2019s close friend, the Hong Kong billionaire Henry Cheng Kar-shun,\u201d head of New World Development and father of collector\u00a0Adrian Cheng<\/strong>, executive vice chairman and CEO of New World Development and founder of the\u00a0K11\u00a0<\/strong>, a venture that blends art, commerce, and development, and that has an associated foundation, the\u00a0K11 Art Foundation<\/strong>.\u00a0Artnet News<\/em>\u00a0reported last year that Wong was \u201claunching a fractional ownership fund specializing in museum-quality works for a broader pool of investors.\u201d<\/p>\n Wong has also been linked to\u00a0Joseph Lau<\/strong>, whose purchase of a smaller Warhol \u201cMao\u201d painting in 2006 for $17 million set the stage for Christie\u2019s bringing the \u201cgiant Mao\u201d to Hong Kong.<\/p>\n Since 2021, Homeart has since done several exhibitions in collaboration with Christie\u2019s, among them an 11-work Basquiat show in Hong Kong. That exhibition, held in May 2021, included an untitled 1982 painting that was purchased at Christie\u2019s London in 2013 for $29 million. (It\u2019s worth noting that Christie\u2019s made a point of telling the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0just after that sale that there was a large amount of bidding from Asia.) That Basquiat painting is also in the current Gagosian \u201cIcons\u201d exhibition, according to several sources who have seen the show.<\/p>\n A representative for Gagosian declined to comment on the identity of the consignor of the Warhol and Basquiat paintings. Wong did not return a request for comment submitted to Homeart.<\/p>\n The four \u201cgiant Mao\u201d paintings are so big that Warhol had to make them in the Factory\u2019s screening room rather than the painting studio. They were so expensive to produce that he needed backing from two galleries (Knoedler & Co.<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Castelli<\/strong>) and an avid collector of his (Peter Brant<\/strong>). In return, each of those parties got a \u201cgiant Mao\u201d painting. The one Christie\u2019s sent to Hong Kong in 2008 went through Castelli to James Mayor, who placed it in a private collection in Europe. Another was sold by Knoedler in 1974 to the\u00a0Art Institute of Chicago<\/strong>. The third, Brant gifted in 1977 to the\u00a0Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/strong>\u00a0in New York. The fourth \u201cMao\u201d Warhol kept, and eventually sold it to\u00a0Charles Saatchi\u00a0<\/strong>, who eventually sold the piece to the late German collector\u00a0Erich Marx<\/a><\/strong>, who, in 2007, put it on long-term loan to the\u00a0Hamburger Bahnhof<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0museum in Berlin.<\/p>\n Coincidentally, the Hamburger Bahnhof \u201cMao\u201d was in the news this week. The\u00a0Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung<\/em>\u00a0ran\u00a0an op-ed\u00a0by art historian\u00a0Von Hubertus Butin<\/strong>, who speculated that the painting might soon hit the market. Marx died in 2020; three paintings from the Marx collection\u2014two Warhols and a\u00a0Twombly\u00a0<\/strong>\u2014that previously appeared at the Hamburger Bahnhof have been removed from the museum by his heirs. Butin writes that those paintings, which he claims are collectively worth some $170 million, have been consigned to Gagosian and that some may have sold. (Gagosian declined to comment on this; the museum said only that the paintings have been removed.) The Marx collection\u2019s \u201cMao\u201d could be next to go, Butin claimed, writing that there had at one point been a $155 million offer made for that \u201cMao.\u201d The museum said it had no knowledge of this, and dealers told\u00a0ARTnews<\/em>\u00a0that the figure seemed unrealistic. One dealer even called the sum \u201caspirational,\u201d particularly in the current art market conditions.<\/p>\n As for whether the \u201cMao\u201d at Gagosian has found a buyer, the gallery isn\u2019t saying. The \u201cIcons\u201d show is up through July 19.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Source: https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Editor\u2019s Note:\u00a0This story originally appeared in\u00a0On Balance,\u00a0the ARTnews\u00a0newsletter about the art market and beyond.\u00a0Sign up here\u00a0to receive it every Wednesday. When the\u00a0Long Museum, the private institution founded by Chinese mega-collectors\u00a0Liu Yiqian\u00a0and\u00a0Wang Wei, began selling work last year, it felt like a sign of the times. It meant that Asian collectors were not only being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2176,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,13,7,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2175","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-auction","9":"category-events","10":"category-gallery","11":"category-latest-news"},"yoast_head":"\n